According to network protocols, packets at a given layer may be encapsulated into frames at a lower layer in order to transmit the packets from one node to another node of a network. Known techniques provide for encapsulating individual Internet Protocol (IP) packets within individual Ethernet frames. Known techniques also provide for supporting the transmission of real-time traffic over a network. For example, a known technique may use forward error correction (FEC) to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for real-time traffic. Known techniques, however, typically cannot effectively and efficiently encapsulate packets into frames. For example, known techniques, may suffer from high overhead for small sized packets. Also, known techniques may not be able to provide continuous uniform QoS guarantees for real-time traffic in contention-based Ethernet networks.